HUM 3306: History of Ideas

Prof. Bruce Harvey

 

 

 

1^st: remind yourself when the “Modern Age” is:

--900-1300:     Middle Ages

--1350-1600:   Renaissance

--1700-1800:   Enlightenment

--1780-1830:   Romanticism

--1830-1880:   Victorian/Industrial Age

--1900-WWII: Modernism

--WII+:            Contemporary or Post-Modern

 

2^nd: Keep in mind that with all these historical-era titles, they imprecisely designate actual chronological historical periods and cultural mind-sets within those periods.  So, for instance, although Nietzsche is writing during the late Victorian period, he is anticipating/developing themes of “Modernism.”

 

3^rd: I’m emphasizing the darker aspects of Modernity and Modernism; other cultural historians might emphasize, even amidst the two World Wars, the spread of democracy, liberating technology, cosmopolitanism, artistic experimentation and so on.

 

4^th: Nonetheless, there is a qualitative difference in the meaning of the atrocities of the 1^st ½ of the 20^th-Century:

 

--There have always been horrors: the plague in the late Middle Ages, the mutual blood-letting of the Holy Wars between Christians/”Turks.”

 

--But only in the 20^th Century, does mass devastation and death become absurdist, mainly because trench warfare in WWI (although Germany ultimately lost) gained no territory/tactical advantage, just micro-adjustments of the warring sides’ trench lines, as 10,000s were slaughtered by gattling guns, cannon, and poison gas (personal note: my grandfather died from health complications from being gassed in WWI).

 

--The absurdist element is compounded by the mechanism/technology of slaughter.  In previous wars, the violence was more intimate and personal (knight charging against an infantry bowman; charge of Civil War units against each other, etc.); in the 20^th Century in becomes impersonal/mechanistic.  This is the point of the famous poem by Randall Jarrell about WWII fighter-bombers, in which military carnage is imaged in terms of an unnatural mechanistic/cruel pregnancy/abortion:

 

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

 "A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose." -- Jarrell's note.

 

--Only in the 20^th Century does slaughter/genocide/threat of devastation become not only mechanical, it becomes hyper-logical and bureaucratic.  Think of the perverse efficiency of the Nazi regime; think of the Cold War “logic” of mutual assured annihilation.

 

--And yet:  even as the horror/violence is rendered non-local in collective memory (not memory by tribe or region alone) by photographic images and newsreels which makes it graphic, intense, and ample, the images also distance us from the visceral immediacy of violence/warfare.  To put this more simply: only in the 20^{th C}entury do we become spectators of violence/genocide.

 

 

 

--The bleak/existential perspective of many 20^th-century philosophers (in which consolations are a matter of will and pragmatic ethics), derives from the historical-contextual gloom of above.

 

--But it also derives from the 19^th-century dethroning of the arrogant optimism of Enlightenment detached/scientific knowing/scientific confidence:

 

--Romanticism writers worry about soul-less selves and a soulless world

 

--Darwinian evolution and “deep time” shrink humankind’s story to a mini-slice of time (see the beginning of Nietzsche’s essay).

 

--Marx says most of us (workers) are alienated; Western “progress” has not made humankind substantially happier (Rousseau, roughly a century earlier, complained about modern “civilization’s” decadence and creation of false needs, etc.).

 

--Freud: the famous Descartes line “I think therefore I am” (a pure statement of rationality) is utterly undercut by Freud’s notions of a dark, simmering, traumatized unconsciousness.  “You” don’t even know who “you” are!

 

--So, broadly in summation, if we move into the 20^th century with less old world hierarchical restrictions on selfhood, we also lose connection with nature (Wordsworth’s anxiety), with artisan creative labor (Marx’s idea of alienation), with a sense of God’s special plan for us (Darwinian evolution), and our own rational selfhood (Freud).

 

 

 

Read this online biography: E-text: Nietzsche biography

Summary:

--born in 1844 in Prussia
--raised, after his father’s death, by mother and aunts (perhaps later revolts from “feminine” influence)
--intense gradeschool/highschool education
--studies Classics and languages/philology in college
--in 1869, asked to teach philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, before finishing his Ph.D. (he was extremely precocious!)
--writes a number of philosophical/aphoristic works: ex. Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
--in 1890, goes insane from syphilis of the brain and dies in 1897
--he is considered the most famous philosopher of the 19^th/20^th centuries for his radical iconoclasm.

 

--He had no faith in social reform (say, the betterment of the working class).

--He hated universal suffrage/democracy.

--He did not believe in Enlightenment/19^th-Century idea of progress.

--He thought middle-class society makes us complacent, overly comfortable, and thus weak, part of the cow-like herd; constricting individual autonomy, spontaneity, brilliance, will, and instinct (all the latter produce great art, cultural changes, etc).

--He critiqued universal or absolute/transcendental standards of good and evil.

--He condemned Christian morality, as herd/slave morality (only the weak say turn the other cheek or that the meek shall inherit the earth).

--In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) says early Christians=slave herd subdues aristocratic/Roman superiors by condemning traits they lacked: power and will and life-force; says that Christianity became an ethic of guilt.

--In his book, The Anti-Christ (1888), Nietzsche wrote that: “Christianity has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man. . . . Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the instinct of strong life. . . . Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated.” 

 

Read Nietsche's essay:

 

E-text: Nietzsche essay--On Truth and Lie

E-text: Nietzsche essay--On Truth and Lies--IF ABOVE LINK DOES NOT WORK

There are obscure sections in this essay, and sometimes (largely because of the translation) it is difficult to sense when N. is being sarcastic/ironic and making a straight point.  Nonetheless, the main points are clear enough:

 

--N. opens by de-centering our anthropomorphic sense of our significance within the cosmos.  “[How] aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.”  [Remember lecture points about Darwin and “deep time.”  In N’s day, there was also the anxiety of entropy; that the universe was running down, and eventually the sun would cool off, etc.]

 

--For N., the intellect serves to delude us into accepting the fabric of “flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing … acting a role before others and before oneself…”: in short, living inauthentically.  [Critique of “civilized” man’s inauthenticity go back to Rousseau’s seeming preference for the ‘noble savage.’]

 

--We are so deluded are we by our “proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream,” that we’ve lost all vital animal primal-ness, all sense of our darker selves, of appetite and ferocity. [Remember Wordsworth’s anxiety about having laid “waste his power,” in the world of “getting and spending.’]

 

--N. has a difficult and obscure lead-in to his critique of the conventions of language by which all immediate, creative, spontaneous knowing of particulars or what he calls “things in themselves” is clouded by concepts and abstractions, which are “arbitrary differentiations.”  Rather than sensuously appreciating all the multi-varied leafs, we generate the abstraction “leafiness,” or we catalogue the world Peale-like fashion. [Modernism and Post-modernism both are preoccupied with the artifice of language; that language constructs the world, rather than being a secondary reflection of the world; and, if we are all caught up in the conventions of language, we can never pass beyond language to some truth exterior to ourselves.]

 

--N. does not object to language’s construction of reality; he objects to our forgetting that the “truth” of the world is constructed: “Only be forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid . . . only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.”

 

--The last sections, on ancient Greece, are obscure.  But basically N. repeats his opposition between sterile rationality and vital, sensuous, intuition: the rationalist unlike the intuition-ist “wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with a dignified, symmetrical features….”